Science is Lucky to Have 2 Sean Carrolls

I've mentioned that my current reading is a book by Sean B. Carroll called "Endless Forms Most Beautiful". Sean B. is on the cutting edge of the newest scientific advances in evolutionary developmental biology - Evo-Devo. A month or so ago Ordinary Girl posted a link to a talk given by Sean Carroll, so I was greatly interested in seeing it. It turned out to be Sean M. Carroll, a physicist from Cal Tech and a very interesting scientist in his own right.

I also mentioned Bloggingheads.tv on a recent post. I was taking my own advice and watching a couple of "diavlogs" there and came across a fairly recent one featuring Sean M. Carroll. It started kind of slowly for me (I'm not a big String Theory aficionado) but then it got really interesting. If you click on this, you will go straight to the part I'm talking about (one of the nice features on Bloggingheads is something called "dingalinks", which allows you to create a specific starting and ending point for any of their diavlogs. Another feature I like is that you can run the video at a faster speed, so you can see a 1 hour video in about 40 minutes).

In this particular part of the diavlog, Sean M. and George Johnson get into science and religion and some terrific points were made. They spoke of the proliferation of both science and religion blogs on the net, and how blogging about things like atheism has been really helpful. They talked about some great scientists who still are religious - to greatly varying degrees and discussed how it could be possible to maintain these beliefs in the modern age. Sean refers to the conundrums of belief in a theistic god and about his own success in getting someone to change their mind. All in all, a great video. Once you get to the video, if you do want to watch the entire diavlog, just click on the link they provide.